PoliticsThe sociologist Gershon Shafir believes the world today is divided between the followers of Leo Strauss and the followers of Sayyid Qutb. No doubt this will be news to many. If it is true, and there are strong reasons to believe that it is, then the many should be assured that it is very bad news indeed.
Anne Norton tells us that Shafir's opinion was communicated to her "at dinner some months ago"; the chattily informal tone - elsewhere she unacademically refers to people getting their knickers in a twist - is characteristic of Norton's timely, elegant but eccentric study of one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century. Norton, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, studied at the University of Chicago under teachers who had been students of Leo Strauss, such as Joseph Cropsey, Ralph Lerner and Leon Kass; hardly household names, either here or in America, but highly influential figures all the same.
Norton was at Chicago when another Straussian, Allan Bloom, was teaching there. Bloom was a household name, after the publication in 1987 of his book, The Closing of the American Mind, aincandescent attack on falling standards in university education in the United States, which became a huge and wholly unexpected bestseller. Bloom appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and, at the other end of the scale, was the thinly disguised central character of Saul Bellow's novel, Ravelstein.
It was in Bloom's colourful and noisy book that most Americans, even academics and intellectuals, first encountered the name of Leo Strauss. This did not please his fellow Straussians, even though, as Norton says, "Bloom, far more than Strauss, has shaped the Straussians who govern in America". The Straussians see themselves as a self-appointed elite working their influence quietly, even clandestinely, not only in the groves of academe but in the corridors of political power. Strauss's following has all the characteristics of a cult, even down to seeing itself as persecuted. As in any cult, there are masters and apostles. Norton gives an amusing account of her teacher Joseph Cropsey's classes at Chicago, when "little men in the front . . . would scurry into action with tape recorders . . . They were very old grad students, even for Chicago, very clerkish, very Dickensian, and rather pathetic". These "puppies", as Leo Strauss dubbed them, were only the most extreme among a high consistory of extremists: "Straussians adore their teachers. They talk about them the way young girls talk about horses and boy bands . . ."
This all seems droll and harmless, the mere hothouse antics of unworldly academics. The Straussian reach, however, stretches far beyond the ivied walls of the universities of Chicago, Harvard or Toronto. Followers of Strauss now occupy some of the highest positions in American public life. The list which Norton presents is impressive. It includes Norton's former teacher, Leon Kass, now chairman of President Bush's Council on Bioethics; Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, who has served in the Defense Department; and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the main players in George W. Bush's war on terror and in the invasion of Iraq, and the new president of the World Bank. No little men with tape recorders these.
So who was, who is, Leo Strauss, and how did the teachings, and the teaching, of this relatively obscure scholar come to exert such influence in American life and politics? He was born near Marburg, Germany, in 1899. His parents were country folk, and in his earliest days he expected to grow up to be like them, or almost so; his ambition, he said, was to be a postman and breed rabbits, but also to read Plato. He studied philosophy at various German universities, wrote his dissertation under Ernst Cassirer at Hamburg, and was an early follower of Carl Schmitt, the social philosopher and, later, Hitler's chief jurist.
Strauss wrote commentaries on Schmitt's book, The Concept of the Political, and Schmitt in return wrote a recommendation for a fellowship that allowed the young, Jewish scholar to leave Germany and study in France, England and America, thus escaping the fate of so many of his fellow Jews at the hands of the Nazis. In America in 1938 Strauss found a teaching position at the New School for Social Research, and in 1949 moved to the University of Chicago, where he taught until his retirement in 1969. He died in 1973.
STRAUSS'S METHOD OF teaching was deceptively simple and straightforward, consisting mainly of close and passionate readings of what he fondly referred to as the "old books", by Plato and Xenophon and Aristotle, by Spinoza and Machiavelli, by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides and the Arab neoplatonist Alfarabi, by Hobbes and Locke and Nietzsche. "When Strauss came to the United States," Norton writes, "this way of reading had fallen out of favour in the universities." However, as Mark Lilla, a present-day professor at the University of Chicago, has observed, "recaptured naiveté is an old Romantic trope, as Strauss knew perfectly well". Studying under Strauss the old European, young, postwar Americans, Lilla writes, were like "provincials just discovering the world beyond the city's walls", and his present-day followers "treat him less like Socrates than like Moses".
In a key text, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss insists that in many of the "old books" the "truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines", in order to fool the inquisitors, secular and religious. As Norton says: "The strategy aims not at concealment but at preservation, transmission, and openness: so that ideas which might otherwise be lost can continue." The trouble is, according to Norton, that Strauss's followers have engaged in an opposite endeavour. Where Strauss sought to reveal, they seek to conceal. "They have forwarded another understanding of secret teachings. In this view some ideas must be permanently concealed from the uninitiated," just as "priests taught their parishioners not to read the Bible alone, lest they be led into error", an interdiction with which Irish Catholics, at least of a former generation, will be familiar.
Norton's view of Strauss's teaching aims may be somewhat over-benign. The British scholar, MF Burnyeat, has condemned the Straussian method, declaring that "surrender of the critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss's ideas". Strauss's ideal academy consisted, Burnyeat writes, of "the philosopher", a Straussian one, of course, and "the gentlemen", those who "have money without having to work too hard for it" and who, according to Strauss, have "had an opportunity to be brought up in the proper manner". The lesson "the philosopher" teaches is, says Burnyeat, "the limits of politics": since a just society is impossible, "'the gentlemen' should rule conservatively, knowing that 'the apparently just alternative to aristocracy open or disguised will be permanent revolution, i.e. permanent chaos, in which life will be not only poor and short but brutish as well.'"
Commenting on an introduction Strauss wrote to a text by Maimonides, Burnyeat sees Strauss agreeing with "what he supposed to be Maimonides' unobvious meaning, that no philosopher can believe in religion but it is most necessary that nonphilosophers do so". Hence, for instance, the Mephistophelian pact the new American right has made with Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, with Constitution freaks, Montana neo-Nazis, and the wilder talk-show hosts. Better the extremism and vulgarity of a Rush Limbaugh than the liberalism of what the IRA used to call the "slobbering moderates".
Strauss was convinced by one of the central tenets of Carl Schmitt's thinking, namely, that a people defines itself inopposition to its foes. The history of civilisation, according to Strauss, is a history of oppositions, the main one of which was, for him, that between Jerusalem and Athens - between revelation and reason, theology and politics, the Book and the law. In order to find a resolution of these extremes, or at least an accommodation between them, it is necessary to establish a "horizon beyond liberalism". The old conservatism, of which Norton gives a decidedly dewy-eyed account, would no longer do. Enter the neo-cons.
The world of the neo-cons has no room for compromise: it is both a rock and a hard place. Their contemporary heroes are the tough men, autocrats such as Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Ariel Sharon in Israel. Even Lincoln is seen not as a defender of liberal values but as a harsh promoter of "democracy" - a word which the neo-cons define in their own, special way. Of Carnes Lord's The Modern Prince, Norton writes: "Throughout the work the reader is told that leaders must learn how to 'manage' elites . . . Leadership is autocracy." Or as she puts it, with elegant pithiness, "Athens must become Sparta".
IT WOULD BE foolish to claim that the Bush administration is composed entirely of Straussians - one cannot imagine Rumsfeld or Cheney curling up of a night with the master's Natural Right and History or Persecution and the Art of Writing - but undoubtedly the attitude of the White House and the Pentagon now is Straussian, if not Schmittian. The new warriors have gone forth to impose their version of democracy on the world, whether the world wants it or not. In Islam they have found the necessary enemy. The result, for the US, is a dictatorship by stealth. Bush, his family and advisers, aided by the Supreme Court, stole the election in 2000; it was an American coup; will the neo-cons be willing to relinquish power in 2008? They know better than we do, for we are Nietzsche's Last Man, sunk in liberal sloth. Wolfowitz in effect says to us what the Spartan mother said to her son who complained his sword was too short: Step closer.
And Sayyid Qutb? He is fundamentalist Islam's version of Leo Strauss. Qutb, born in a small town in Egypt, was, like Strauss, a teacher. He went to study in the US in the 1940s. At college in Colorado he was shocked by what he saw of American life - couples were allowed to dance, in public, body to body! When he returned to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and became, Norton writes, "one of the principal architects of modern Islamic radicalism". Eventually he was arrested by Nasser's police, was tortured, and hanged.
Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri, is a Qutbite, as were the 9/11 hijackers. One of Qutb's more radical innovations was his declaration that Muslims who did not agree with his version of Islam were not in fact Muslims, and therefore could justifiably be slaughtered, a doctrine which is played out daily on the streets of Baghdad. Norton writes:
The disciples of Sayyid Qutb saw themselves cleansing Egypt and the Muslim world, driving out "Pharaoh." The disciples of Leo Strauss saw themselves as the salvation of modernity, restoring at least some of the strength and virtues that belonged to the Ancients . . . If each party had claimed, among its own, that the prize that was at issue was the world, no one would have believed them.
We believe them now.
John Banville's new novel, The Sea, will be published later this year by Picador
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire By Anne Norton Yale, 235pp. £16